All three systems are doing wonderful things despite by underfunded for years. A few days ago, while sitting on a panel to discuss the changing reference landscape, I heard from Donna Ciampi at Queens Library about a really interesting collaborative email reference service for patrons who speak one of the many Chinese dialects. The service is staffed by librarians at Queens Library and the Shanghai Library(!!!) If you go the Chinese language page on the Queens Library site, look for the link for CORS, which takes you to a page with a form (on the Shanghai Library site) for submitting your question.

My goal at the panel was to explain how the collaborative chat reference service in QuestionPoint works and to encourage my audience to consider collaborative reference services an important, growing trend in the way libraries can meet the information needs of users. I noted how hard member libraries in QuestionPoint’s academic cooperative work together, but I must admit here to being amazed by the effort on the part of the librarians at the Queens Library and the Shanghai Library to establish this joint project.

QuestionPoint’s academic cooperative is limited to college libraries in the United States at the moment. Australian libraries that use QuestionPoint on their own have so far resisted joining the cooperative. I have heard, though, that a group of public libraries in the United Kingdom are planning to join QuestionPoint’s public library cooperative soon. I hope that in the coming years we see more and more reference partnerships like the one between the Queens Library and the Shanghai Library.